The Pricing & Plans For 250 API Platforms

16 Apr 2016

I track on the API operations of around 2000 companies. Honestly, most of the 10K+ APIs in the ProgrammableWeb API directory have long been gone, deprecated, acquired, and had the lights shut off. There are only a couple thousand companies, institutions, organizations, and government who are doing public APIs, with only a couple hundred doing them in an interesting way.

This should not diminish the API conversation, as public APIs are just one aspect of the API discussion, and honestly it is one are that not all companies and organizations will have the stomach for. However, a certain amount of available public APIs will always play an important role in setting the tone for the entire API space, providing us with a (hopefully a diverse amount of) lead(s) when it comes to crafting our own strategies for operating our businesses on the Internet. Very little of what I do as the API Evangelist involves ideas that originate from my own head, and is something that requires a wealth of examples which I can point to in the wild.

I am working on new ways to earn a living, while also generating research, analysis, code, and specification that the API sector can put to use in their own operations. One way I will be doing this, is by publishing technology, businesses, and politics of API design guides. This isn't API design as in the sense of REST, and how you craft endpoints, it is design thinking around the operations of your API. I learn a ton, flipping through the API portals of the 2000+ companies I keep an eye on, and I wanted to carve off small chunks of this, and share with you.

One area of API operations that has always fascinated me, and is one of the original founding focuses of API Evangelist, is how companies craft their API plans and pricing. Whether or not an API has a plans & pricing page is a very telling signal all by itself, as APIs are often a side-project, without any real support and investment from its parent company or organization, and the lack of a coherent plan, with simple pricing is often a sign of other deficiencies. However when an API plan and pricing page is present, I to find it to be a very telling representation of a company, organization, institution, government agencies, and even individual(s) in some cases.

I track on many data points for any single API I keep an eye on. Ranging from their Twitter account, and Blog RSS, to the activity of their Github profiles. One of the areas I link to, when present, is the plans and pricing pages. This gives me the ability to quickly check up on the pricing of APIs across various business sectors, something that drives my API plans research. With the help of my organization API, and my screenshot API, I was able to easily harvest, organize, and make available the plans and pricing for 250 of what I feel are some of the more relevant APIs out there today.

To help make my research more explorable, I organized my API plan and pricing highlights into a single PDF guide, which allows you to experience the best of my API research, without all the clicking and searching I had to do. When I record details about the plans and pricing for an API, I have a rating of 1-3 for what I call API plan coupling, which is how tightly coupled their monetization strategy is to their API. Is the pricing that is present directly applied to API consumption, or is it more for the SaaS or PaaS side of things? While not all of the plans & pricing I include in this research are tightly coupled with the API, they are all from platforms where the API does play a significant role in platform operations.

I have many of these the common building blocks employed for the API monetization strategy, and for the actual API plan implementations, recorded in a machine readable way, as part of my research. For this guide, I wanted to step back, and look at things through more of a design lens, and less from the technical, business, or even the political side of things. I think the visual of each plan and pricing page says a lot, and doesn't need a bunch of analysis from me to fluff it up. Just flipping through, you get a sense of what looks good, what doesn't, a process that I think will hopefully push forward more consistency across the API space.

There are numerous lessons present in the screenshots in this guide, around which building blocks are required to support API plans and pricing. Things like breaking things up into tiers, providing contact information, mechanisms for receiving a quote, demo, and know that a trial version is available. There are also lessons in how to present large amounts of very complex information, and some lessons in not how to do it, with plenty of evidence of why simple works. Oh, and that you should have a decent graphic designer! ;-)

I dismiss claims from the vocal startup, and VC elite, who point out the absolutes when it comes to API monetization, and pricing. That freemium won't work, and that offering unlimited access via API is always a mistake. Every company, API, and consumer will be different. In my opinion there are a wealth of strategies available out there to learn from, which we can apply in your own strategy. There are many variables, seen and unseen, that go into whether or not an API will be "successful" or not, and I strongly reject the notion there are absolutes -- there are only agendas, usually of the behind the scenes kind.

I have a number of API plans and pricing pages that I did not include in the current release of this guide. I will consider evolving, and shifting it up regularly, like I try to do with my other guides. I know I learn a lot from having them in a single place, that I can easily flip through and experience the design patterns present across these 250 API platforms, and hopefully you do to. I'm currently planning an interactive micro-app version of this research, as well as the coffee table edition for the API socialite who also enjoys entertaining.